The rapid advances in communications technologies of recent years have greatly expanded the service options available to telecommunications consumers. Today consumers have choices over the types of services they choose to employ, as well as the technology platforms on which they elect to receive such services. Just a small sampling of the types of services consumers may take advantage of include voice communication, email, instant messaging, text messaging, internet access, audio and video broadcast services, and so on. Voice services may be provided over traditional land lines, wirelessly via a cellular telephone network, or over packet switched networks using Internet Protocols. Audio and video, traditionally broadcast wirelessly over the public airwaves as radio and television signals, are now available via broadband cable networks or as streaming media over the internet using Internet Protocols as the media transport layer. In sum, there are many different communications services available today. Likely there will be many more available in the near future. And there will be ever more flexible ways of delivering communications services to customers.
The proliferation of new services and the new mechanisms for delivering them provide great opportunities for telecommunications service providers. New services provide opportunities for new sales. In this environment the ability to quickly develop and roll out new telecommunications products and services will be a great competitive advantage. What is more, customers typically rely on a suite of telecommunications products and services to meet their communications needs. Often it is more convenient for customers to purchase or subscribe to a single umbrella product that is a composite of all of the individual products and services the customer needs. For example, a customer may wish to receive internet access, voice communications and television service from a single source and delivered via an IP network connection. Preferably the customer will purchase all three services as a single composite product that incorporates internet access (IA), voice over internet protocol service, and internet protocol television service (IPTV). For convenience, the composite product may be given its own descriptive name. For example, the product including IA, VoIP, and IPTV may be referred to as “Triple Play” based on the three services incorporated into a single product.
For customer service, accounting, and other business reasons, it is desirable to treat a composite telecommunications product such as the Triple Play product as a single product as opposed to an aggregation of individual products sold separately. Operationally, however, each service must be individually provisioned and activated whenever a customer purchases the composite product.
An end-to-end solution for provisioning the sub-products and services associated with a composite telecommunications services product is desirable. Preferably such a system would be capable of provisioning and activating multiple services and telecommunications products based on a single customer order for a single composite product. Such a system should be capable of monitoring the provisioning of each service and reporting exceptions, as well as reporting when all provisioning tasks for all of the services are complete.